that which joins and that which divides: on re-spelling

I had always been an avid reader, but the summer before starting undergrad I began reading and writing poetry seriously for the first time. I was drawn toward love poems—whether because of or despite having no beloved in my life—and wrote truly terrible sonnets. I spent most of the time alone, in a near-beachfront apartment my dad had begun renting; he was mostly gone, following my parents’ recent divorce. I wrote love poems less to anticipate a coming love than as a way of clearing out the space of head and heart—and in that clearing, wait, for the sake of waiting only. 

Heading to my family’s first sans-Mom gathering at a chain-restaurant steak house midway between our new place and my grandfather’s home, 
I saw a large used bookstore across the street, and, once everyone had left the restaurant, I walked the bookstore aisles. A brilliant red book caught my eye, displaying a black-and-white photo of e.e. cummings’s chiseled bald head—the copy I still own and hold now as I write this. His blending of Shakespearean diction, postwar dissatisfaction, and childlike reverie resonated, however hyperbolically, with my own anxious awaiting. I was drawn to phrases like “it’s/spring//when the world is puddle-wonderful” from his first collection, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). I identified with compounds like “puddle-wonderful,” evoking a childhood long gone, even as its formulation remained complex, hopeful, and adult. Poetry, I sensed, might dwell in indeterminacy rather than seek to resolve it. 

My undergraduate writing was largely in the shadow of cummings. My work became marked with typographical interruptions, visual insertions, and excessive commas. I wanted to imagine a vernacular that didn’t exist yet remained familiar—familiar enough to defamiliarize the uncanniness I sensed in the world around me. This was exemplified above all in cummings’s use of spelling. While I’d come to learn it wasn’t uncommon for poets to invent their own diction, idioms, or dialect through re-spelling words in idiosyncratic ways, cummings was the first poet I encountered who approached that practice. For instance, consider his “l(a” from 95 Poems (1958); it reads in full:

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

The poem sets a simple enough conceit: the image of a leaf falling caught within the single word “loneliness.” Across thin lines, one’s attention goes first to letter pairings (the abrupt pronouncing of “la,” “le,” “af,” then “fa”—a strained if not musical attempt at speech), before excavating the word “one,” followed by “oneliness,” and lastly, toward the awareness we’ve been within the word “loneliness” the entire time. One moves through
registers of attention and interpretation that at first compete, yet ultimately complete themselves in the pairing of loneliness with the pastoral image made possible by those very interpretations we consider and abandon as we read.

Reading cummings’s later poems would lead me to writers like bill
bissett. bissett is squarely in the realm of re-spelling: his idiomatic spellings effect their own style, voice, and world. Like cummings, one simultaneously encounters a phonetic reading, which brings with it new meanings, concurrent with the presumed, standardized spelling and meaning it deviates from. Decipherment becomes the poem: “whats missing from my poetree,” bissett writes, “statements totalee in support uv free edukaysyun, guaranteed min/imum inkums 4 evreewun” (from, appropriately, “they cut back sew much on th backs uv th poor”). The world we are in is simple and familiar even as it’s speculative and multiple. Polysemous play grounds bissett’s urgent 
sincerity, all rendered immediately at the level of the letter. 

While exploring re-spelling in my own work, I also began reading poets like Aram Saroyan, Harryette Mullen, Caroline Bergvall, and P. Inman, as well as all the re-spellings of online meme culture and its attendant poetry scenes—flarf and alt lit. I learned re-spellings could create hybrid worlds like in Cathy Park Hong’s work (see “Ballad in A”) or meditate on a single word like the portmanteaus of John Marron’s oiyeau (one page of which merely reads: “proetlariat”). The varieties of re-spelling something, whether word or whole dialect, are endless and the effects so varied as to be rather silly to attempt rules, conventions, or standards. The very category bucks against categorization. Reading the work of these poets, however, calls up what led me to re-spelling with cummings that day at the bookstore—the unwieldy usefulness of re-treading something that appears natural to at once denaturalize and imagine natures past it. 

As I began drafting the poems that would become my second collection, feeld (2018), I found re-spelling a useful analogue for appearance and 
representation more broadly. 2014 was the “trans tipping point,” as they called it, and news stories highlighted murdered trans women or anti-trans legislation alongside front page covers of transitioning celebrities. Legibility, representation, authenticity, access, truth: these became proliferating terminologies that people spoke and advocated for even as the actual, lived lives of trans women remained quite disposable. There was a discursive struggle, as there is still, for how trans women were to be naturalized or not within that millennial Obama-era optimism—draped as it was, like a sheet on a rocking chair, over the usual and swaying imperial fascisms of old.

The re-spellings of feeld, which sit between Middle English and internet slang, reflected for me the apparent contradictions between the liberal future-facing aspiration that transness seemed to promise—that individual belief could overcome history, accumulation, and assignation—and a material life, and law, that was consistently at odds with it. Re-spellings allowed puns and homophones, and yet words still collapsed into their usual sedimented meanings. In a word like feeld, for instance, one sees a homophonic resonance of  fiel- and feel within the word. Yet lines with the word feeld often don’t denotatively pun on “having felt something,” even as one senses the pun in excess of meaning—as in a line like “1 daye u wil be all ere//a ewe alowne/inn a feeld//off mare.” The effect, for me, is two-fold: one senses both this is just how “field” is spelled in this language (a la Piers Plowman’s “fair feeld ful of folk” with a pithy 2010’s iPhone app-vibe) and a sense of another meaning struggling to appear. 

A poem like “tonite, i wuld luv to write” uses these multiple reading practices less to question their limits and more to testify to the appearances and disappearances that resonate and naturalize them. Even as the speaker longs to “rite the mothe” (whether that’s to write of a moth, perform a rite for a mouth or mother, and so on), the poem concludes into the nights the speaker must tether, the trees they have left to gather. Even as the spirit of belief (e.g. “riting the mothe”) is the condition for meaning’s possibility, it ultimately crumples into the usual laboring at legibility and meaning. And yet, by letting the reader turn the poem over, to encounter the multiple logics that cut through it—such is my hope—something else slips in. It is still “a plesure to b alive.” It is better to gather and tether than it is to “rite” or “thum” at belief. In the failure and seam of such meaning, there is another way guided by neither the believing spirit nor the lawfulness of the letter but the mutual possibility that happens when you and I meet at the rift of the two.

Another poet of re-spelling, Ian Hamilton Finlay, once wrote down upon a small bridge of  two boards in his garden of Little Sparta—on one board the text running one way, the other way on the other—“that which joins and that which divides is one and the same.” The apparent rifts in our discourses, to me, are like such a joint. Liberal hope and conservative return, to continue the example, both actively ignore the disappearances their very appearance is built upon. Yet, in the elision of their claim to the language, strategies for something else emerge; there are joints, sutures, irruptions, reconfigurations, and all the ways of bridging or sliding through the gap that I know no other word for than poetics. Metaphor, as my MFA teachers were quick to say, means “to carry across.” Whether in the lineations of cummings or the idiomatic orthography of  bissett, re-spelling takes this logic from meaning to letter and back again: poetics as a suture which at once holds open and clarifies the wound. Not every poem will warrant its minutiae or expansiveness. Yet, as a poetic tool, re-spelling can be an invaluable asset to clear out the too-familiar sedimented world of appearances, and, in the inevitable failure of our own interpretive rules, reveal what might be possible, briefly, when we gather in its clearing.